4 80s J-pop albums

These are some rips I've had sitting around for a while. A few years back, every time I would go to Academy Records there would be a couple of old japanese LPs, either enka, J-pop, or anime-related. I expect they were parting out some estate sale they'd picked up. I'd pick up a couple of them on the cheap whenever I saw them, and that was the source of the synthesizer fantasy records I've posted previously. I've got about twenty records from that estate, I figure, but the only ones I've posted have been the truly strange ones. These four LPs are some of the more average ones, but they're also some of my favorites (not hard, I think there's four or five Yamato soundtrack/drama LPs in the mix). There's a great blog here if you're interested in finding more or finding these in better quality: http://tsuzilla.blogspot.com/

Akina Nakamori - Third
Kyoko Koizumi - My Fantasy
Marina - Evergreen
Creamy Mami - Last Curtain

Gear Change: SYSEX Bonanza!

This time around, I've got a special treat for you guys. I've finally gotten around to dumping some custom patches from a few instruments I've had around, essentially the only ones that have bulk-dumping (or any kind of MIDI dumps at all, damned late-model Siel synths). Most of these aren't actually ones that I've made, I've sold off most of the synths that I used to tweak. On offer here is a sysex dump of an E-mu Proteus/1 (mostly factory patches but I've done some nice solid basses, might be worth a look), a Roland Alpha Juno 2 which was passed around the south Brooklyn Rave scene throughout the 90's and went through the hands of several big names, supposedly including Beltram, and the 3 Hoovers definitely lend some credence to that. There's some other absolutely great patches for the Juno 2, very soundtrack and dance oriented, with some evolving pads and moody drones. Finally, there's the custom patches from the Matrix-6R that I got for free when I picked up another keyboard last year (he thought it didn't work, turns out it was just that one output was dead). Some big custom leads, the usual strings, and some odd experiments, but the big sell on this set of patches is the tweaked upright bass preset, which he turned into one of the biggest, most gut shaking bass tones I've ever heard from any analog synth. You can drop these into a Matrix-1000 too, should work fine, and they blow away any of the presets on that box.

I did two dumps of the Alpha Juno 2 since it didn't belong to me and I couldn't confirm that they were correct. If anyone uses it and can confirm in the comments, that would be a big help! Thanks.

A Few Bits and Peices for E-mu Proteus/1
South Brooklyn Rave SYX for Roland Alpha Juno 2
Toolkit 6R SYX for Oberheim Matrix-6 or Matrix-1000


Should work in any SYSEX dumper just like normal, they were dumped to a Peavey Data Streamer and then copied onto an old laptop from the floppy disk though, so any confirmation would be welcome.

As always, remember to dump up your patches to a SYSEX file before loading any of these, because they will overwrite any custom patches you already have on your synth!